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Web Services is a distributed technology to connect two desperate systems as such we have two different systems developed on two different platforms.
In the absence of Web Services only option we have is like you have to migrate one of them to the platform of other.
And when we use Web Services we need not get into such kind of effort which is costly affair.
Instead we can expose Web Service from any of those system so that they can be integrated with each other.
But how Web Service is achieveable, its not a magic actually.
We have 3 pillar technology that come into picture like WSDL, in short we call WSDL and stands for Web Service Definition Language.
And SOAP again stand for Simple Object Access Protocol and then we have something called UDDI.
So these are the 3 technologies together make Web services what they stand today.
WSDL is an intermediate definition language that stands between client and server.
They take care how we expose services to two different platform.
SOAP as a payload structure which is XML based, can make message exchanging possible across two different structures.
UDDI essentially implements service locater pattern using which client can hunt for different services i.e. the 3rd pillar.
So when we combine all these 3 things together you can pick up any of these application as it stands today.
And can expose as a Web Service that is one way of doing it, we generally call it as contract last Web Service.
If we are planning a new service we can first expose WSDL so that the clients can start developing their artifacts.
While we can implement the server based on the WSDL which is actually a good approach because it is essentially the contract first approach.
As we said both client and server can be on two different platforms, most of the platforms today have tools to generate artifacts for both client and server.
So developing them either on Java platform or .NET platform or any other contemporary platform should not be an issue as we have these tools.
As such Web Services is one of the great way to implement what we popularly call as Service Oriented Architecture.
We see more and more cloud based applications and SOA applications these days, I would personally say Web Services are here to stay...
...more and more technology tool and ecosystem support is coming.
It is good to learn Web Services and good to work with Web Services because it is one of the promising technologies for the next few years, Thank You!